The Russification of Soviet Minority Languages
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lead in the course of two or three generations to the
formation of several large ethnic groups; specifically,
to the formation of larger Slavic and Turkic national
entities. Eventually, the territory of the Soviet Union
might embrace perhaps no more than a dozen national-
ities, living under conditions in which their national
cultures would flower, in which peace between na-
tionalities would be strengthened. However, the present
regime's policy of enforced national conformity and
ill-concealed russification offer little hope that such a
beneficial development would ever be allowed to take
place.
The Russification of Soviet Minority Languages
By Uriel Weinreich
cq'cNE emperor, one religion, one language-this
was the epitome of Tsarist policy toward the
scores of national minorities inhabiting the vast area
of the former Russian empire. Even ethnic groups
which were not persecuted outright had their lan-
guages and national individualities suppressed as the
Tsarist Government tried to force on them the speech
and culture of the Russians. This policy of russifica-
tion gencrated a centrifugal resentment which con-
tributed in no small part to the overthrow of Tsarism
in March 1917.
One of the first acts of the ill-fated democratic
Provisional Government was to proclaim the principle
of equal rights for all nationalities. When it was in
turn overthrown by the Bolsheviks in November 1917,
the equality principle allegedly was retained and even
implemented in some respects. But Bolshevik policy
toward the minority nationalities had not yet matured
internally. It was torn between Lenin's disdain for
national culture as a bourgeois phenomenon and the
practical need to appease the thriving separatism of
the many minority groups.1 Stalin thought he could
reconcile the contradiction by the following formula,
announced in 1925:
Proletarian in content and national in form-such is the
universal human culture toward which socialism is march-
ing. Proletarian culture does not abolish national cul-
ture, but lends it content. Conversely, national culture
does not abolish proletarian culture, but lends it form.2
In thus denying to Soviet nationalities any inde-
pendence in the content of their cultures, Stalin was
following the Leninist path. On the other hand, he was
allowing the nationalities some independence of cul-
tural form.
1 The theoretical evolution of communist nationality policy is
treated in the preceding article by Solomon M. Schwarz.
2 Joseph Stalin, Marxism and the National and Colonial Ques-
tion, New York, n.d., p. 209.
A member of the Department of Linguistics, Columbia Univer-
sity, New York, Mr. Weinreich is the author of Languages in
Contact (New York. 1953), a study of tilingualism.
Whether or not the dichotomy of form and content
is philosophically tenable when applied to culture, it
was alleged from the beginning that language was to
be classified with the forms of culture, and hence
was to remain national.
An examination of Soviet language policy reveals,
however, that the Stalinist formula regarding the na-
tional form of culture is a myth. In the first place,
Stalin did not delimit form and content. This am-
biguity constituted, in effect, a Damocles' sword over
the heads of the national minorities, and it proved to
be the undoing of countless minority intellectuals who
one day found their. work branded as bourgeois na-
tionalism, that is, a preoccupation with the national
content, instead of the mere form, of their cultures.
Secondly, Soviet ideological literature frequently over-
looks Stalin's distinction and speaks disparagingly of
traditional, patriarchal forms of culture or approv-
ingly of socialist national forms, even though the
forms of Soviet culture are supposed to be free of
social and class connotations. Here, for example, is
a passage from an official work in which every sentence
proclaiming national cultural autonomy in form
is qualified by a fatal but:
[What is national form?] National form is, first of all,
the language in which a work is created. But the socialist
[i.e. Bolshevik] Revolution has changed the life of the
languages of Soviet peoples in many respects . .. National
form means those images which a writer draws from the
folk peculiarities of his nationality ... But the Revolution
has radically changed the way of life of the peoples of
the U.S.S.R. and every people creates its own new folklore
with new motifs and images. National form is the sum
of all those peculiarities of historical and cultural develop-
ment which have found their expression in the themes
of literary works . . . But the Revolution has radically
changed the historical fate of the peoples of our home-
land...3
The most eloquent denial of tolerance for the na-
tional forms of culture is furnished by actual Soviet
8Bolshaya sovetskaya entsiklopedia (Large Soviet Encyclo-
pedia), 1st Edition [quoted hereafter as B.S.E.], vol. U.S.S.R.,
Moscow, 1948, p. 1479. Emphasis supplied.](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/probscmu2&div=58&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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The Russification of Soviet Minority Languages
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